td->td_critnest manipulations do not use atomic_add_int ?
Luigi Rizzo
rizzo at icir.org
Tue Dec 20 08:16:19 PST 2005
On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 06:34:20AM -0800, Suleiman Souhlal wrote:
> Hello Luigi,
>
> Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> > as in the subject... i see that td->td_critnest (used to determine
> > whether a thread can be preempted or not) is manipulated using
> > plain ++ or -- instruction instead of the atomic_add_int().
>
> This should be fine as it only gets modified by the current thread. If
> an interrupt comes while we are decreasing td_critnest back to 0, then
> we just don't get preempted immediately, but at the end of our quantum,
> or when someone else tries to preempt us, whichever comes first, which
> should be totally harmless.
i think that there are still some potential race conditions if
the variable is read from another processor to make a decision
based on its value.
My understanding is that when critical_enter() returns, everything
in the system should read td->td_critnest >= 1, which may not
be guaranteed by the current implementation (which doesn't have
smp locks).
There might be similar issues in the 1->0 transition.
cheers
luigi
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